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No More Acronyms

My New Years resolution

I jokingly made a New Years resolution this year to remove acronyms from my vocabulary, but it’s working.

I hate industry speak. It comes off as pompous to those out of the loop, and at its worst, causes enormous confusion and lost time. Acronyms and abbreviations are the worst.

I could probably count on twenty hands how many hours of my time has been wasted waiting for someone to clarify an acronym or abbreviation they used in an email that completely impeded a project, resulted in bad directions, prevented me from purchasing something; you name it. I am convinced that in aggregate, abbreviations and acronyms have easily wasted more time and money than they have saved mankind. It’s time to stop using them, and I aim to set an example.

The most ridiculous thing a full-stack web developer could do is stop using acronyms. If I can do my job with hypertext markup language, cascading style sheets, asynchronous JavaScript and XML, structured query language, personal home page/hypertext preprocessers, etcetera… so can you!